The Binary Circumstance

This story sounds like it’s out of the Dark Ages. Once science gets married to religion or politics, it ceases to exist. This is yet another reason why I don’t want the government messing around in my health care, although it’s obviously already too late to stop that. They’ve been doing it for decades.

This article makes you wonder how many other possible cures they’ve suppressed.

From Alternet.org:

Most Americans don’t know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.

The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice — lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.

The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out — unsuccessfully — to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”

60 Minutes did a story tonight on the California water shortage and their decaying levee system. It is well worth watching and you can watch it here.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I think it’s interesting that although a huge increase in the state’s population is mentioned, nobody explicitly says in the story that relentless population growth is the root of the problem. California and the American southwest have been grabbing water from surrounding areas for decades and all that has done is promote more growth. People forget that most of California is a desert. It’s supposed to be dry. That’s what makes a desert a desert.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is called “the green governor,” thinks that spending $40 billion to build more dams, shore up the levees and move more water around is the solution. That sounds like a short-term solution to the current lack of jobs but isn’t it just making the same mistake they’ve made in the past? It can only lead to more growth which will ultimately lead to the need for more water.

On the subject of water wars and shortages, I also recommend Blue Gold: World Water Wars

I learned something today that I’ve never heard before on Nature @ PBS.org:

While still in their mother’s uterus, sand tiger shark embryos develop teeth–and an appetite. The largest of the babies in each of the sharks’ two uteruses attacks and eats its smaller siblings, leaving just two pups to be born.

It’s a particularly gruesome and extreme example of siblicide, the killing of one’s siblings, and the a rare form of cannibalism within the womb. And yet the practice of cannibalism itself, once thought to be an aberrant behavior, actually isn’t as rare in nature as we might like to believe.

[...]

Among small mammals like hamsters, mice, and rats, mothers often do the eating; after delivering a litter of pups, a new mom may realize that food and water are scarce, and will kill and eat her litter for self-preservation. Cannibalism can also occur to cull a an overly large litter, or when the animals are stressed. In many animal species including snakes, stillborn or deformed babies are often immediately consumed by their mother, which lets her get back at least some of the energy investment she put into her pregnancy (while also protecting any viable babies from being exposed to diseases from sick or decaying offspring).

But don’t tell anyone working on health care reform. They might get ideas.

It appears that Jupiter was recently hit by a large object, maybe a comet.

The article includes some cool pictures.

Just image if that happened to earth. Actually, something similar has happened at least once to earth.